Roaring Boys

by Judith Cook

  George Chapman who, as we know, had financial problems right from the start, supplemented his income with translation, tackling first Homer’s Iliad and then the Odyssey, under the patronage of the King’s eldest son, Prince Henry, on the understanding that once he had completed the first part of the task he would have a pension for life. The Iliad was finally published in 1611 and he must have sighed with relief as he saw security finally within his grasp, but unfortunately Prince Henry died that same year and the King reneged on the arrangement, leaving Chapman to face his most serious financial crisis yet and a great deal of debt.

  The profession widely regarded as having a licence to print money is that of the law, and three of the Jacobean dramatists, John Marston, John Ford and John Webster all trained as lawyers, when it might well be that they also developed a taste for theatre since plays were a popular form of entertainment at the Middle Temple, where they all studied. Marston’s father, a Shropshire lawyer, was the Recorder of Coventry when Marston was born and became Lent Reader at the Middle Temple in 1592. On 2 August of that year the sixteen-year-old Marston was ‘especially’ admitted to the Middle Temple by his father. He was a very privileged student and a bright future had beckoned him, as two years later he achieved his first degree. But he had started writing for publication almost as soon as he began to study.

  ‘Eroticism and satire’, writes M.C. Bradbrook in her biography of John Webster, ‘both fashionable, were Marston’s scandalous choice for poetry of an ambivalent, yet pointed, wit.’ He soon involved himself in the world of the playhouses, although records suggest that from time to time he returned to the Middle Temple and undertook some legal work, probably sharing his father’s chambers there until, in 1599, his father died, leaving his own law books ‘to him whom I hoped would have profited by them in the study of the law, but man proposeth and God disposeth’.5

  Thereafter for some years it seems God disposed that Marston would devote his time to his theatrical interests, rather than his official profession. At least his father did not live to see the part played by his son in the well-publicised Poets’ War or the trouble he was in over Eastward Ho! Marston had his greatest success in 1604 with his play The Malcontent, but after that he started to lose his taste for it and some time in 1607 began to study seriously for the ministry. The next time we hear of him, on 8 June 1608, he has been committed to Newgate gaol on an unspecified charge, although it is thought that this was a formality to do with some kind of a legal infringement connected with the breaking up of the Queen’s Revels Company in which he then had a share, not anything political or serious. On 24 September 1609 he was made a Deacon in the Parish Church of Stanton Harcourt, went from there to St Mary’s Hall, Oxford, to study further and on 18 June 1610 was ordained priest before finally, some years later, being given the lucrative living of Christchurch in Hampshire. He had come a long way from the precocious law student who first made his name with Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image, described by Bradbrook as ‘frankly pornographic’.

  Of the second of the trio of lawyers, John Ford, we know very little except that he spent his entire adult life hard up and casting round for funds. Born in 1586 into a family of Devon gentry, he was related to the then Lord Chief Justice Popham. After possibly studying at Exeter College, Oxford, he was admitted to the Middle Temple where his behaviour was sufficiently bad for him to be sent down for two years. His misdemeanours included taking part in a protest against ‘wearing caps in hall’ and not paying his bills. His first published work appeared in 1606 but his early plays are among those lost by Warburton’s cook and he remains best known for his extraordinary ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which is actually about incest not prostitution, and various collaborations with Dekker.

  His father died in 1610, presumably having given up on him, his will having been drawn up by John’s brother, Henry, wherein it was willed: ‘To John Ford, gent, my brother twenty pounds a year for the term of his life . . . upon condition he surrender the estate he hath of two tenements called Glandfields grounds in Bilver park and willow meade, lying in Ipplepen and Torbryam, to the use of my children.’ This at least gave him a small but regular income and it does seem that from time to time he returned to the law to earn a meagre income. An odd description of him survives in two lines of anonymous verse:

  Deep in a dump John Ford was got

  With folded arms and melancholy hat.

  However out of the three lawyers it is John Webster, whom we first came across in 1602 writing for Henslowe, who managed successfully to combine working in the theatre with both law and the family business. T.S. Eliot’s verse about him is well known:

  Webster was much possessed by death,

  And saw the skull beneath the skin

  And breastless creatures underground

  Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

  An unkind description of him, penned by a Henry Fitzjeffrey, claims:

  But h’st! with him Crabbed Websterio,

  The playwright, cartwright: whether? either? ho?

  No further, look as ye’d be looked into:

  Sit as he would read: Lord, who knows of him?

  Was ever man so mangled with a poem?

  See how he draws his mouth awry of late,

  How he scrubs; wrings his wrists; scratches his pate.

  A midwife! Help! By his Brain’s coitus,

  Some centaur strange: some huge Bucephalus,

  Or Pallas (sure) engendered in his brain,

  Strike Vulcan with thy hammer once again.6

  It is particularly insulting and snobbish as it describes him as ‘a cartwright’ much in the way the University Wits, and Henslowe when angry, referred to Ben Jonson as a ‘a bricklayer’. Although, as a writer Webster is associated with dark deeds and violent death because of his two great plays, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, there is nothing to suggest that he was a particularly depressed or gloomy person. He had been born into a comfortable household, his father being a successful coachbuilder (hence ‘cartwright’) and probably went to the Merchant Taylors School before being admitted to the Middle Temple to study law. The small body of work that has come down to us does suggest that he might well have had a reputation for writing slowly and with some difficulty, and it is unlikely that he could ever have made a good living only from plays, but then he did not need to for once he had qualified it seems he took over the legal and administrative side of the family firm, leaving his father and brother to see to its practical side.

  The White Devil, the first of the two famous tragedies both based on real events, was first performed during the winter of 1611–12 at the Red Bull theatre, Webster choosing that particular playhouse because he rated the company’s young leading actor, Richard Perkins, very highly indeed. He actually mentions him in the published postcript to the play: ‘In particular I must remember the well-approved industry of my friend, Master Perkins, and confess the worth of his action from beginning to end.’ This was the first time any actor had been so honoured, including Alleyn or Burbage. But, Perkins apart, it was not a particularly good choice of venue for the Red Bull has been described as ‘a rowdy house with a vulgar audience’, although in fact it was more what we would describe today as a neighbourhood theatre, providing popular fare for local people. It also presented all kinds of spectacles, such as firework displays and pageants, supplementing its income by hiring out costumes and properties.

  Unsurprisingly therefore, given the play’s complexities, it was not a success. ‘Ignorant asses’ is how Webster described his audience at its first performance. M.C. Bradbrook suggests that at least he could console himself with the thought that in the previous year Ben Jonson’s second attempt at Senecan tragedy, Catiline, had fallen just as flat as his Sejanus had some years earlier. Possibly it was The White Devil that prompted Fitzjeffrey’s catty poem for he finished it:

  But what care I, it [the play] will be so obscure

  That none shall understand him I am sure.


  The reception he received for The Duchess of Malfi, however, a year or so later was very different, not least because this time his play was performed by the King’s Men in the Blackfriars Theatre and to a far more sophisticated audience. It was chosen for production by John Hemings, and when Webster published the script he named the leading actors along with the parts that they played. John Lowin, now recognised as a leading actor, played Bosola; Burbage, the Duchess’s murderous brother, Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria; Henry Condell, the evil Cardinal of Aragon, and young Richard Sharpe, the Duchess. The part of Antonio, the Duchess’s steward who becomes her second husband, was played by William Osler, who died not long after its first production. The play proved popular right from the start, not only because it was put on in the right place to the right people, but because the story is a great deal less complicated and more accessible than that of the White Devil and its tragic heroine is so sympathetic. Crowds flocked to see it and as late as 1635 it was chosen for a command performance before King Charles and his Court.

  During the winter of 1614–15 Webster’s father died, leaving his two sons a considerable estate. Edward Webster renewed the lease on the family property in February 1615 and John took out his ‘freedom by patrimony’ of the Merchant Taylors as he was now sufficiently well off to be able to afford his ‘Freedom of the City’, which enabled him to vote in the Common Council and enjoy coveted trading privileges. He wrote little for the theatre after this but did become involved in writing and putting on city pageants.

  The decade from 1603 to 1613 was to see some of the very finest Jacobean plays. From Shakespeare, after Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest were still to come along with the lesser Timon of Athens, Pericles and Cymbeline, and it is now generally agreed that he collaborated with John Fletcher on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Ben Jonson’s great Volpone also had its first production in 1606 and was followed later by The Alchemist, not to mention the work of Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher and the rest. But over and above it all, especially towards the end of that period, there is a sense of fragmentation, that the theatrical world as it had been known was beginning to break up.

  On 3 July 1613 Sir Henry Wotton sat down and wrote a letter to his nephew, Sir Edmund Bacon, informing him of a dramatic event which had taken place four days earlier on 29 June:

  Now to let matters of State sleep, I will entertain you at present with what hath happened this week at the Bank’s side. The King’s Players had a new play called All is True, representing the principle [sic] pieces of the reign of Henry VIII which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in truth, within a while, to make greatness very familiar if not ridiculous.

  Now King Henry, making a masque at Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers [cannon] being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff wherewith one of them was stuffed, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train [of gunpowder], consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him if he had not by the benefit of provident wit, put it out with bottle ale.7

  Burbage must have thanked Providence that he had acquired the Blackfriars since he was now able to transfer his entire operation over the river. The sharers immediately made plans for a new theatre. The new and improved Globe rose from the ashes of the old within a year, at a cost of £1,400, and was described by John Chamberlain in a letter dated 30 June 1614 as ‘the fairest that ever was in England’.

  It was also that same year that Shakespeare made his last major property purchase, a smart house in Blackfriars, which seems somewhat strange as he was now spending more and more time in Stratford to the point where John Fletcher had virtually taken over from him as resident dramatist of the King’s Men. The Blackfriars property, a large dwelling, was conveyed to him on 10 March of that year at a cost of £140, of which he put £80 down as a deposit, the balance of £60 to be paid off as a mortgage. The Conveyance Deed according to the relevant documents tell us that the ‘dwelling house, shops, cellars, sollars, plot of ground and singular other the premises above, by the presents mentioned, to be bargained and sold and every part and parcel thereof with the appurtenances, unto the said William Shakespeare and William Johnson, John Jackson and John Hemmings’.8

  The three men were his sureties for his mortgage. Hemings, as we know, was his friend and fellow sharer in the King’s Men, Jackson was a city merchant and Johnson the landlord of the actors’ favourite tavern, the Mermaid. They were never called on to honour their guarantees for Shakespeare paid off his mortgage in full and on time. He then created a trusteeship for his London property which, on his death, was to be sold off on behalf of his family with the profits going to them. A very different picture, this, from the position in which the hardworking and prolific Thomas Dekker found himself and who, at the same time, was arrested for debt and spent the next three years in and out of debtors’ prisons.

  Yet another sign of the passing of an era was the death, two years later, of Robert Armin, the last of the great clowns for whom Shakespeare had specifically written. At this point Ben Jonson, who must have had some realisation of what was happening and who alone among his contemporaries saw his work as something for posterity, collected together his best poetry and existing play texts and in 1616 had them published in a Folio edition. King James, recognising his status as poet and dramatist, awarded him a pension for life. The year 1616 also saw the death of Francis Beaumont. Whatever his relationship with Fletcher might have been, three years earlier he had married Ursula, heiress to Henry Sly of Sundridge in Kent. There were two daughters of the marriage, the younger, Frances, born posthumously. Beaumont died on 6 March 1616, the cause unknown, but he achieved burial in Westminster Abbey.

  His death, however, was totally overshadowed by that of another, for on 23 April, Shakespeare died at his home in Stratford. His father had died in 1601, his mother in 1608, both having reached a decent age, but their children, with the exception of their daughter Joan, were not long-lived. Gilbert had died in 1612 at the age of forty-five and Richard the following year at the age of thirty-nine. Death was also taking its toll elsewhere. Shakespeare had named his twins Hamnet and Judith after his friends the Sadlers, and in 1614 Judith Sadler died as did another old friend, John Combe, who is buried next to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church.

  It is ironic that Shakespeare, who had so successfully avoided scandal while living in a hotbed of it in London, was to find himself embroiled in a local one only weeks before his death. On 10 February 1616 Judith Shakespeare, now aged thirty-one and considered an elderly spinster, finally married Thomas Quiney. The couple were married at Holy Trinity Church but were then immediately summoned to appear before the consistory court in Worcester for marrying without a proper licence. Quiney refused to attend and was promptly excommunicated; no mention is made as to whether or not Judith suffered the same fate. The problem arose because a special licence was needed for Lent weddings and although the banns had been properly called for three weeks, no such licence had been applied for. But worse was to come.

  There is a possible reason for such sudden haste to the wedding. While supposedly courting Judith in what can only be described as a leisurely fashion, Thomas had been involved in an affair with a young woman called Margaret Wheeler who was now having his child. The proper and expected thing for him to do was to marry her, not Judith. But he chose not to, possibly because he was aware of the advantages of marrying into a well-off family, and marriage to Judith would release him from this obligatio
n. Poor Margaret, after suffering a difficult pregnancy, died in childbirth along with her baby a month after the marriage. They were buried on 15 March.

  This time Quiney was summonsed before an ecclesiastical court especially set up to deal with cases of ‘whoredom and uncleanness’ (popularly known as ‘bawdy courts’), and he appeared before it on 26 March confessing to having had carnalem copulacionem, carnal copulation, with ‘the said Wheeler’ and was sentenced to the usual punishment for such an offence: to perform open penance, dressed in a white sheet, before the church congregation for three Sundays in a row. Unusually, and possibly due to his father-in-law’s influence, this was commuted to paying a fine to the parish and acknowledging his crime, fully dressed, before the minister of Bishopton Chapel. Not surprisingly a marriage off to such a poor start was doomed from the outset.

  In January, Shakespeare had called in his friend, the lawyer Francis Collins, and drafted his will, which was substantially altered in March, possibly as a result of Judith’s marriage, signing that he was at that time ‘in perfect health and memory’. A host of causes, all surmise, have been suggested as the cause of his death: that he died, variously, of alcoholism, Bright’s disease, exposure after sleeping a night under a crab-apple tree (!), typhus, cholera, paralysis, epilepsy, apoplexy, arterio-sclerosis, excessive smoking, angina pectoris, pulmonary congestion and syphilis. The best-known one, which has something of the ring of truth, is that put forward by a later vicar of Stratford, the Revd John Ward, in 1662 and might well have still been extant locally. ‘Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seemed drank too hard for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.’9